• Blog

• All

Jun 26, 2009 Web Exclusive By Thomas Vale

Michael Jackson is gone, and public reactions are about evenly split between those focusing on his greatness and those focusing on his weirdness. He locked down both adjectives—redefined them, in fact, and will serve as a standard for both great and weird for a long time to come.

He proved the greatness with a career that placed him at the very top of the pop music mountain, with only Elvis Presley and The Beatles for company. The weirdness he established with a set of incidents and habits that hardly needs reiterating—suffice it to say that the possible inclusion of Lou Ferrigno (aka The Hulk) in his final hours barely raised an eyebrow.

My own estimation of Michael Jackson followed the same trajectory as that of most of my generation: first, unquestioning awe and devotion, then, gradual loss of interest and respect, and finally, nostalgia and ironic appreciation—something that passed for wisdom.

Jackson was the first star we knew as ours, not our parents'. And because he went supernova at the right time—when we were all starting to pick our own heroes—he provided our first, and most spectacular, lesson in stardom. Stars freak out: we knew that after MJ. Weird things happen. They set their eyebrows on fire and are best friends with chimps. And more fundamentally, we learned that they can go somehow from cool to not cool—it was inconceivable to my ten-year old self that people (like me) would one day see the King of Pop as tragic or silly.

His career built a new skepticism into my take on any later pop stars. (Not for nothing was the next pop icon we took to—Kurt Cobain, who famously knocked Jackson out of the number one spot on the charts—full of knowing irony about his own stardom.) We knew from there on out that anything could happen to these people.

With Jackson, we didn't see it coming. Older people—those who remembered the pill-popping, kung fu fighting, glazed over final days of Elvis—may have had a sense. But we hadn't read Shakespeare; we didn't know yet what happens to kings. We just wanted to moonwalk, we wanted to learn all those Thriller moves, we wanted to absorb some of whatever that guy in the white suit with the tiger pup crawling on him had. We figured if we could just be a little bit more like him, we'd be ok.